Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

stevehanov.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 539 posts

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#101

Post by usernametaken29 »

hackingonempty wrote: post #31

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server. I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over…

I have used SQLite with extensions in extreme throughput scenarios. We’re talking running through it millions of documents per second in order to do disambiguation. I won’t say this wouldn’t have been possible with a remote server, but it would have been a significant technical challenge. Instead we packed up the database on S3, and each instance got a fresh copy and hammered away at the task. SQLite is the time tested alternative for when you need performance, not features

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#103

Post by anana_ »

vxsz wrote: post #11

I learned nothing. Most of this seems like common basic advice, wrapped up in AI written paragraphs... Initially from the title, I thought it would be about brainstorming and launching a successful idea, and that sort of thing.

> Sometimes you need the absolute cutting-edge reasoning of Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o

Dead giveaway

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#105

Post by andai »

jstanley wrote: post #35

The most interesting thing in here is https://github.com/smhanov/laconic which is the author's "agentic research orchestrator for Go that is optimized to use free search & low-cost limited context window llms". I have been doing this kind of thing with Cursor and Codex subscriptions, but they do have annoying rate limits, and Cursor on the Auto model seems to perform poorly if you ask it to do too much work, so I am…

Yeah, came here to mention that too!

From the article:

>To manage all this, I built laconic, an agentic researcher specifically optimized for running in a constrained 8K context window. It manages the LLM context like an operating system's virtual memory manager—it "pages out" the irrelevant baggage of a conversation, keeping only the absolute most critical facts in the active LLM context window.

The 8K part is the most startling to me. Is that still a thing? I worked under that constraint in 2023 in the early GPT-4 days. I believe Ollama still has the default context window set to 8K for some reason. But the model mentioned on laconic GitHub (Qwen3:4B) should support 32K. (Still pretty small, but.. ;)

I'll have to take a proper look at the architecture, extreme context engineering is a special interest of mine :) Back when Auto-GPT was a thing (think OpenClaw but in 2023), I realized that what most people were using it for was just internet research, and that you could get better results, cheaper, faster, and deterministically, by just writing a 30 line Python script.

Google search (or DDG) -> Scrape top N results -> Shove into LLM for summarization (with optional user query) -> Meta-summary.

In such straightforward, specialized scenarios, letting the LLM drive was, and still is, "swatting a fly with a plasma cannon."

(The analog these days would be that many people would be better off asking Claw to write a scraper for them, than having it drive Chromium 24/7...)

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#106

Post by senko »

anana_ wrote: post #103
vxsz wrote: post #11

I learned nothing. Most of this seems like common basic advice, wrapped up in AI written paragraphs... Initially from the title, I thought it would be about brainstorming and launching a successful idea, and that sort of thing.

> Sometimes you need the absolute cutting-edge reasoning of Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o Dead giveaway

Maybe it's tongue-in-cheek.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#107

Post by senko »

gobdovan wrote: post #20
vxsz wrote: post #11

I learned nothing. Most of this seems like common basic advice, wrapped up in AI written paragraphs... Initially from the title, I thought it would be about brainstorming and launching a successful idea, and that sort of thing.

Usually when there's "on a [low] $/mo" you'll hear basic advice. You'd be surprised to find out many folks are not aware of this!

Well, there's also the "How we saved $10M/mo by actually paying attention to indexes" trope.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#108

Post by asymmetric »

gobdovan wrote: post #18

Nice list! I'd say the SQLite with WAL is the biggest money saver mentioned. One note: you can absolutely use Python or Node just as well as Go. There's Hetzner that offers 4GB RAM, 10TB network (then 1$/TB egress), 2CPUs machines for 5$. Two disclaimers for VPS: If you're using a dedicated server instead of a cloud server, just don't forget to backup DB to a Storage box often (3$ /mo for 1TB, use rsync). It's a good…

> Also avoid their object store.

Curious as to why you say this. I’m using litestream to backup to Hetzner object storage, and it’s been working well so far.

I guess itt’s probably more expensive than just a storage box?

Not sure but I also don’t have to set up cron jobs and the like.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#109

Post by wanderlust123 »

berkes wrote: post #43
tkcranny wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot to be said about his approach with go for simplicity. Python needs virtual environments, package managers, dependencies on disk, a wsgi/asgi server to run forked copies of the server, and all of that uses 4x-20x the ram usage of go. Docker usually gets involved around here and before you know it you’re neck deep in helm charts and cursing CNI configs in an EKS cluster. The go equivalent of just coping o…

Yes. It strikes me as odd how many people will put forward Python with the argument of "simplicity". It is not. Simple. It may be "easy" but easy != simple (simple is hard, I tend to say). I'm currently involved in a project that was initially layed out as microservices in rust and some go, to slowly replace a monolyth Django monstrosity of 12+ years tech debt. But the new hires are pushing back and re-introducing py…

I am not following the difficulties you have mentioned. Setting up a local dev environment in Python is trivial with UV.

The only major downside of Python is its got a bit poor module system and nothing as seamless as Cargo.

Beyond that the code is a million times easier to understand for a web app.

Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

#110

Post by jbverschoor »

hackingonempty wrote: post #31

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server. I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over…

I've been doing that for decades.. People seem to simply not know about unix architecture.

What I like about sqlite is that it's simply one file

Post reply on HN